Monday, April 30, 2012

Londontown

I found this wonderful article on the New York Times, all about London! From a Londoner's perspective. I have yet to spend more than 12 hours in the city...although I've been there twice; both times I had really long lay-overs and got to venture out of Heathrow. This was the most recent trip there. But I am completely in love with the city! The antiquity mixed with modernity, the fashion, the history, the food, and (although I love languages) they speak English! (just makes it easier to adapt quickly.)

Have you been to London before? The UK? What is your favorite thing about it?

My London, and Welcome to It

By A.A. GILL

IF you’ve
saved this article for your long-planned trip to London, and you’re now reading it
for the third time, circling Heathrow, well, I’m sorry. You’re probably still
up there because the queue at passport control has become mutinous. They’re
snaking out onto the runways — grim, silently furious visitors, unable to use
their phones, forbidden from showing anything but abject acquiescence to the
blunt instrument that is the immigration officer at the distant desk.

I always feel
bad about the queues at Heathrow as I walk to the coming home rather than the
going abroad line. And as you stand there, for hours, looking at the two groups
— the indigenous and the visitors — you’ll notice something. It’s a good thing.
A heartwarming, little consolation thing. They look exactly the same. There is
no difference between you and us, not in color, ethnicity, dress or demeanor.
Those who live in London and those who visit are exactly the same.

In half my
lifetime this city has become a homogenous, integrated, international place of
choice rather than birth. Not without grit and friction, but amazingly polyglot
and variegated. I travel a lot, and this must be the most successful mongrel
casserole anywhere.

Every
national team that comes to compete will find a welcoming committee from their
homes. London is the sixth largest French city in the world. The Wolseley, the cafe where
I often eat, and where I wrote a book about breakfast, has 24
nationalities working in it, from every continent bar the Antarctic. They’re
also all Londoners. And that’s a good thing. Although I understand that, as a
visitor, it’s not necessarily what you want to come and see — this department
store of imported humanity. You want stiff-lipped men in bowler hats and cheeky
cockneys with their thumbs in their waistcoats and fish on their heads.

I’m sorry,
but they’re not here anymore. No city’s exported image lags so far behind its
homegrown veracity than London’s, so let’s start with what you’re not going to
find. We’re all out of cheeky cockneys, pearly kings and their queens, and
costermongers. You’re not going to find ’60s psychedelia and the Beatles in
Carnaby Street. There aren’t any punks under 50 on the King’s Road; there are
no more tweedy, mustachioed, closeted gay writers in Bloomsbury, no Harry
Potter at King’s Cross. There aren’t men in white tie, smoking cigars outside
Pall Mall clubs and there isn’t any fog, but you can find Sherlock Holmes’s house on
Baker Street.

A lot of
London’s image never was. There never was a Dickensian London, or a
Shakespearean London, or a swinging London. Literary London is best looked for
in books, and in old bookshops like Sotheran’s on Sackville Street. One of the
small joys that’s easy to miss in London is the blue plaques on buildings. These are put up
to commemorate the famous on the houses they lived in. You won’t have heard of
a lot of them, but some come as a surprise. There are quite a few Americans and
some amusing neighbors. Jimi Hendrix lived next
door to Handel, in space if not in time.

London is a
city of ghosts; you feel them here. Not just of people, but eras. The ghost of
empire, or the blitz, the plague, the smoky ghost of the Great Fire that gave
us Christopher Wren’s churches and ushered in the Georgian city. London can see
the dead, and hugs them close. If New York is a wise guy, Paris a coquette,
Rome a gigolo and Berlin a wicked uncle, then London is an old lady who mutters
and has the second sight. She is slightly deaf, and doesn’t suffer fools
gladly.

Trying to be
a tourist at home is tricky. It’s a good discipline, and rather disappointing.
I know as little as you do about being a visitor in this town where I have
lived since I was a year old, having been born in Edinburgh. We all look at the
crowds of tourists on the Mall and think: What is it you see? What do you get
out of this? Like every Londoner I know, I’ve never seen the changing of the
guard. It’s an inconvenient traffic snarl-up every weekday morning.

With more
guilt, I realize that London may be a great metropolis, but it’s not very nice
to people. We’re not friendly. Not that we’re rude, like the Parisians with
their theatrical and frankly risible haughtiness; nor do we have New Yorkers’
shouty impatience. Londoners are just permanently petulant, irritated. I think
we wake up taking offense. All those English teacup manners, the exaggerated
please and thank yous, are really the muzzle we put on our short tempers. There
are, for instance, a dozen inflections of the word sorry. Only one of them
means “I’m sorry.”

So what you
shouldn’t expect is to get on with the natives, or for them to take you to
their bosoms, or to invite you to their homes, or to buy you a drink. They may,
occasionally, if backed against a wall, be rudimentarily helpful, but mostly
they’ll ignore you with the huffing sighs of people in a hurry. When you get
lost, you’ll stay lost.

We have,
collectively, osmotically, decided that we hate the Olympics. It’s costing too
much, it’s causing an enormous amount of trouble and inconvenience, it’s bound
to put up prices, make it impossible to find a taxi, but most of all, one thing
this city doesn’t need is more gawping, milling, incontinently happy tourists.

On the bus
recently a middle-aged, middle-class, middleweight woman peered out of the
window at the stalled traffic and furiously bellowed; “Oh my God, is there no
end to these improvements?” It was the authentic voice of London, and I thought
it could be the city’s motto, uttered at any point in its history, embroidered
in gold braid on the uniforms of every petty official.

I recently
interviewed our mayor, Boris Johnson. He may be the ex-mayor by the
time you land. We have an election coming up. We hate the imposition of that,
as well, and all the possible improvements it might bring. I told him I was
writing this piece, and asked what message he’d like to send, fraternally, to
the people of America, should they be optimistic enough to visit. “Ah, ooh,
well, this is very important,” he said with a faintly Churchillian inflection.
(He was actually born in New York.) “Um, visitors should hire a bike and ride
through the parks.” The vehicles are sometimes referred to as Boris bikes after
him, and have been an unexpectedly wobbly and careening success — easy to get,
easy to use and a really easy way to end up seeing how brilliant the National
Health Service is.

The parks,
though, are wonderful, with a wildness that is artifice. Like the English, they
appear casual, but involve a great deal of work. Go to Hyde Park and Kensington
Gardens, where Peter Pan comes from. You should see his statue on the banks of
the Serpentine. One of the most charming sculptures in any city, it was made by
Sir George Frampton, paid for by J. M. Barrie and erected in secret overnight so that
children out with their nannies would think it had arrived by magic.

London is one
of the finest cities for public statuary. The great and the eternally forgotten
glare down at you from horses and morality. When you get to Trafalgar Square,
as undoubtedly you will, you’ll look up at Nelson’s Column, where Adm. Horatio
Nelson peers down the Mall, either into the bedroom windows of Buckingham
Palace, or to review his fleet; there are small ships on top of all the
lampposts.

You might also
like to pay your respects to George Washington outside the nearby National
Gallery to pay your penance to fine art. He was a gift from Virginia, and
stands on imported American earth because he said that he’d never set foot in
London again. And don’t miss Charles I on the west side of the square. This is
the finest equestrian statue in the city. Just down the road in the Banqueting House, you can see
where his head was cut off, and also the brilliant Rubens painting of the
Apotheosis of James I.

The Thames is
London’s great secret, hidden in full view. We do very little with it, or on
it, except complain how difficult it is to get over and under. It is the reason
London is here at all, but the people stand aloof because we have long memories
and longer noses. The Thames was so disgustingly noxious and pestilent that
Parliament would abandon the Palace of Westminster when the weather got too hot
in the summer, because the smell became dangerous.

London was
the biggest city in the world, and the river was the biggest sewer on earth.
The Victorians finally built an underground sewerage system that was so
efficient we still use it. But they also made the Embankment, which lifts the
city above the river. Getting access isn’t easy, but if you only do one thing
while you’re here, you should take a boat from the center of town and go either
downstream to the maritime museum at Greenwich or up toward Oxford and get off
at Kew Gardens and Syon House.

The river is
the best way to see the city. London glides past you like human geology. It is
not a particularly impressive city seen from above; not like Paris or New York,
although you can go up to Primrose Hill and Hampstead Heath and look back, and
it has a dreamy loveliness brought on by distance. And Wordsworth said that
earth had nothing so fair to show as the view of the morning from Westminster
Bridge. Two hundred years later he wouldn’t recognize it, but it’s still pretty
impressive.

The great
problem for visitors to London is size. This is a big place. It’s not a
walkable city; there are great walks but you can’t stride from everywhere to
anywhere. And it’s easy to lose any sense of where you are in relation to
everything else. So it’s best to do what the natives do, and think of London as
a loose federation of villages, states and principalities, and take them in one
at a time. The oldest bits are in the east. The Tower of London and the Roman
Wall mark the beginning of the city. To the east are the docks and the working
classes, and what is now the trendiest and most youthful, fashionable bit of
London. As the city grew rich, it grew west. Mayfair, Chelsea, Kensington, Notting
Hill are mostly Victorian.

You will do
all the big-ticket tourist things. I doubt there’s anything I can say that will
convince you that the best way to see Tower Bridge is on a postcard, and that
the Tower of London is a big, dull box packed with Italian
schoolchildren, or that Harrods is much the same. But while the living
Londoners are to be avoided, the dead ones should be sought out. St. Paul’s Cathedral
is London’s parish church, the single greatest building in Britain, designed by
Christopher Wren. It’s light, civilized, rational and humane — everything
Londoners aren’t. It has monuments to J. M. W. Turner, the Duke of Wellington
and, of course, John Donne, who preached there. Behind the altar is a little
memorial chapel and stained-glass window dedicated to America and the help it gave
London and the nation in World War II.

Westminster
Abbey is the great church of state. It has the Grave of the Unknown
Warrior, the Coronation Chair, which is surprisingly Ikea and
covered in graffiti from Westminster schoolboys, and there is Poets’ Corner, the marbled hall of fame of
Britishness. Just down the street from St. Paul’s there is another Wren church,
St. Bride’s, by
tradition and practice the journalists’ church. Dryden and Pepys were
parishioners. Above the font there is a little shelf, and on it the bust of a
girl. She is Virginia Dare. Her parents were married here and then emigrated to
the Roanoke Colony. On Aug. 18, 1587, Virginia arrived, the first child of
English parents to be born in America. No one knows what happened to her, but
this is an immensely touching little memorial in the Old World to the promise
of the New. Not one Londoner in 1,000 knows who Virginia was, or that she’s
there.

There are
thousands of these odd moments in London. You will discover your own, like the
alley that has the original Embassy of Texas in it. It’s
like opening the drawers in an old house, where so much was put away for
safekeeping and then forgotten.

Of course,
you should go to the pub. Like the bistros of Paris, the pubs of London are
having a hard time of it. Their role as the working classes’ living room can no
longer compete with cable TV and supermarket beer. But still there are plenty
of beautiful and elegiac pubs, and you should come upon them serendipitously.
But I might commend the Mayflower on the river in the East End. This
is older than the ship that shares its name, which set off from here. And the
Windsor Castle in Kensington is a pretty West London pub. If the weather is
fine, it has a charming garden.

I suppose I
ought to recommend places to eat, as London has such a Babel of palates and
lexicon of digestions. It boasts the most diverse cuisines of any city. But
given that you didn’t come all this way just to eat Chinese or Moroccan, you
can also get good English. It will be meaty and Victorian, long on pork and the
extremities of cows, pigs and offal. Three I recommend. Anchor & Hope near the Old Vic theater on the
Cut, has great food in an energetically noisy pub. Bentley’s Oyster Bar &
Grill off Piccadilly, and St.
John, a restaurant that has become a point of pilgrimage for visiting
chefs. And you really should eat Indian here. Curry is England’s favorite
dinner, and our national dish.

Plenty of
people come to shop, but it’s expensive, and Bond Street and Sloane Street are
pretty much what you’d find at home. It won’t have escaped your notice that the
avaricious first world has become a branded and cloned airport lounge.

One thing
that is singularly British, and specifically London, is men’s tailoring. This
is where the suit was invented, and where it is still made better than
anywhere. Savile Row is a very London experience, satisfyingly and shockingly
costly, but also dangerously addictive. I’d recommend Brian
Russell on Sackville Street, which is now run by Fadia Aoun, a rare female
tailor.

You need to
see London at night, particularly the theaters. But not just the night life.
London itself looks best in the dark. It’s a pretty safe city, and you can walk
in most places after sunset. It has a sedate and ghostly beauty. In the
crepuscular kindness, you can see not just how she is, but how she once was,
the layers of lives that have been lived here. Somebody with nothing better to
do worked out that for every one of us living today, there are 15 ghosts. In
most places you don’t notice them, but in London you do. The dead and the
fictional ghosts of Sherlock Holmes and Falstaff, Oliver Twist, Wendy and the
Lost Boys, all the kindly, garrulous ghosts that accompany you in the night.
The river runs like dark silk through the heart of the city, and the bridges
dance with light. There are corners of silence in the revelry of the West End
and Soho, and in the inky shadows foxes and owls patrol Hyde Park, which is
still illuminated by gaslight.

Now the
Olympics has come and dragged us all into the bright light, and a lot of
attention is being given to London, and we’re not used to it. We’re not good at
showing off. We’re not a good time to be had by all, we’re not an easy date.
London isn’t a party animal by nature, it doesn’t join in or have a favorite
karaoke song. It does, though, have a wicked, dry and often cruel sense of
humor. It is clever, literate and dramatic. It is private and taciturn, a bit
of a bore, and surprisingly sentimental. And it doesn’t make friends quickly,
is awkward around visitors. We will be pleased when all the fuss and nosiness
has gone away.

So come, by
all means, but don’t expect the kindness of strangers unless you decide to
stay, in which case you’ll be very welcome indeed. There’s always room for one
more on top, which is what they used to say on the buses when the buses had
conductors, which they don’t anymore. And that’s another bloody improvement.

A. A. GILL is
a contributing editor for Vanity Fair and a features writer for The Sunday
Times of London. His upcoming book about America will be published by Simon
& Schuster in 2013.